Our Guest Nick Griemsmann
SID: Welcome, welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. My next guest had incurable “schizophrenia.” He was touched by the power of God, set free and then became an administrator in the institution he was hospitalized in, 50 employees under him. Now I asked my personal doctor, Dr. Dietry [sp], last night a question on the phone. “He went off all medicine, all medication, Doctor. To your knowledge, what happens to a schizophrenic that takes no medicine?”
DOCTOR: That’s a good question. It’s an unbelievable phenomenon, schizophrenia. When you come off medication, provided the medication was helping in the first place, you get an extra [unintelligible] a spike of hallucinations, ideations and delusions. It’s not a very pretty sight.
SID: Have you ever heard of someone that’s diagnosed with schizophrenia? Oh, I forgot one more thing. In a few years, he was supposed to be catatonic. That was the diagnosis. A thousand pages of diagnosis, Doctor. Have you ever heard of such a thing?
DOCTOR: Personally, I have never seen anybody come off of medication and be normal.
SID: Well but I have to tell you, Doctor, he is not normal according to the world. He is normal according to the Word of God. So Nick Griemsmann was raised in a secular home. His father left at age, when he was age eight. He got addicted to pornography at 10. At 21, he was a full-blown alcoholic and he was a bartender. But at age 23, you know, we take a lot of things for granted, at age 23, he’s an alcoholic, he’s a drug addict, he’s a mess. I’m just saying it, Nick. And he gets a little tract about the Messiah, and he calls the person on the phone, because there was a phone number on this tract. And what happened?
NICK: The woman on the phone, she was really nice, and she asked me a question, she said something about, “Are you, have you received Jesus?” And I asked her, “What does that actually mean because so many people tell me different things about Christianity and I was studying different religions like Islam and Judaism, different sects in Christianity, and things like that. And so, “What does it really mean to receive Jesus?” And she said, “It’s easy. The Bible says you can confess Jesus as Lord and he will come into your life.” And so I said this simple prayer and he came into my heart, and totally changed me.
SID: What happened to your drug addiction, your alcoholism
NICK: When I said this prayer, it was so incredible. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was on the phone with her and I prayed this simple prayer of faith. I had just faith in God at the time. I said the name of Jesus. And the moment I said the name of Jesus this liquid love came upon me, and for the first time, I knew I was completely free from all my sin, alcoholism, drugs. I had a sexuality immorality I was into, you know the lifestyle of a bartender, and God completely set me free from that.
SID: You know, only God could do something like that. But then right behind the devil came up to him when that seed was planted, immediately, he came up to him because Nick now wants to live for God. And he goes on the Internet and he finds out there’s a place where the guy says he’s one of the End Time prophets and they’ll give him food, they’ll give him shelter, they’ll train him. It sounded pretty good.
NICK: Absolutely. I was trying to find a good church and I found this online. And I thought, wow, I can leave all my old friends and leave my family, and all the troubles I used to have, and I can serve Jesus with my whole heart, because I really loved God.
SID: But it turned out to be a cult. The first crack that you saw in this cult was two of the senior members having a disagreement.
NICK: Yeah. One thing that the cult would preach, that they were sinless. They would say that they never sin or anything like that. And I was there and the men, one night they started arguing over something and they were like almost like throwing blows at each other and swearing. And I thought, they’re preaching that they’re sinless, but it doesn’t look like they are sinless. And my heart started going, well maybe this really, maybe what they’re telling me isn’t all the truth.
SID: But you were so scared because they had this, was it a cassette, that you would have to listen to? And what was the warning it gave you?
NICK: In the cassettes, the prophet, the false prophet, he would say that if we left the church, because they said that they are the one true church, if we left the church it meant that we lost our salvation, blaspheming the Holy Spirit. So as you know, if you’re a young person in God and you don’t really know anything, I believed it and I was very afraid that if I left or talked to my family, they said my family was of the devil, I couldn’t talk to them. And they said that I would go to Hell if I did anything wrong or if I left the church, or said anything about the person in charge there.
SID: But he had such a heart for God. He was crying out and crying out. And one day, he takes off. He ends up in the Nashville Airport. What happened, Nick?
NICK: Well I entered the Nashville Airport and at this time, I started hearing voices in my mind. Before I left the cult, I actually started getting voices in my mind and I thought they were angels, and I thought God was speaking directly to my mind. And so I would listen to these voices. And I was, they would say things and they’d say bad things. And when I was in the Nashville Airport I was going to go to a phone to call my family to pick me up. And the voices came to me and said, “You need to go and you need to make a scene and yell, and scream, and praise God in the middle of the baggage claim area in Nashville Airport.” But I really loved God and I thought God—
SID: So you were willing to do anything for God. I wish, even though it was the wrong voice, I wish more Christians would be willing to do whatever God said. So they picked him up obviously. He’s diagnosed schizophrenic. He’s told in a few years he’ll be in a catatonic state. He goes home to be with his family and his mother insists he go to a little Assembly of God Church— and we’ll be right back.